Excellence over Heroics
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008I value Excellence over Heroics.
‘Excellence’ can be defined as “the crisp execution of established procedures.” Think about that for a minute.
Do you know of a software development shop where several prominent developers often stay up late into the night, or come in regularly over the weekend to solve high-profile problems, or put out urgent mission-critical fires?
The thrill of delivering when the whole company’s reputation is at stake can be addictive. I remember once staying up 37 hours in-a-row to deliver an EDI package for a bankers convention. I was successful, delivering the application just before it was to be demo’d. I went home and slept for 24 hours straight afterwards.
The problem with ‘Heriocs’ is that the hero is compensating for the effects of a broken process. Think about that for a minute.
If heroes are needed to make a software development project successful, then really something upstream is broken.
Most problems requiring heroics at the end of a project stem from improper effort estimations, inability to control scope, inadequate project tracking transparency, mismanaged Q/A scheduling, unnecessary gold-plating, or inadequate communication between the development team and the project users/stakeholders.
A well-organized development group humms along like a well-oiled machine. Proper project scoping, analysis, design deconstruction, estimating, tracking, and healthy communication between development and the users/stakeholders will bring that excellence that trumps heroics.
Hey, I hear that Microsoft is looking for some Heroes.
Mike J. Berry
www.RedRockResearch.com
